Re: why we must get rid of unicode.semantics switch ASAP

Richard Lynch wrote:

On Wed, January 23, 2008 1:28 pm, Rasmus Lerdorf wrote:

I don't disagree with this, and that is actually why I insisted on having the unicode-semantics switch from the early days of the Unicode discussions, so you can blame me, again, if you consider it a bad design decision.

Would the world really end for people who write NEW apps in a NEW version of PHP, #6, if they had to put u"foo" to get their nifty new-fangled Unicode strings?... Surely that is better than making a BC break of gigantic proportions for the unwashed masses that don't know a charset from a croquette and having NOBODY move to PHP 6 except a handful of large corporations...

Like I said, without the unicode semantics switch, we can't make unicode strings default for BC reasons. The switch was there to allow not just large corporations, but also smaller companies and projects not restricted by portability or BC concerns to build stuff from the ground up entirely in Unicode. u"foo" is a hack that will eventually disappear from the various languages that have it or something similar. 10 years from now I doubt anybody could even imagine that you could have a string that didn't carry its character set with it. Unfortunately 10 years ago, I wasn't very concerned about that. -Rasmus